Personal Blog of Alex Mohseni, focusing on Innovation and Technology in Health and Medicine

Monday, December 30, 2013

Declining ER volumes are predicted by google searches

Many emergency rooms across the country may be sensing that their patient volumes are not as high as anticipated. This is a big issue for many emergency departments because staffing levels have to match expected patient volumes for financial reasons (overstaffed EDs will lose a lot of money and be unsustainable). It is very interesting to me that Google web searches by people for the terms "ER" and "Urgent Care" reflect what is happening in the market: more and more patients are searching for urgent care facilities for their unscheduled care instead of ERs. Here is a graph I created using Google Trends to show this trend: